TIFF Review: The Men Who Stare At Goats

The Men Who Stare At Goats

OPENING: 11/06/2009

STUDIO: Overture Films

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
More of this is true than you would believe.

Opening Statement
A surrealist and psychotropic exploration into the more unconventional nooks and crannies of American defense budget allocation, The Men Who Stare at Goats is a charming film without a purpose. Adapted from a nonfiction account into the more eccentric areas of military defense spending, hilarious performances from its top-tier assure an easy victory for audiences.

Facts of the Case
Reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) is in a funk. A stagnating career, a fiancé who leaves him for his editor, his life lacks purpose. To attempt to find deeper meaning (and impress his ex) he volunteers in 2003 to cover the Iraqi war, but ends up on the sidelines in Kuwait. While waiting for something, anything to happen, he meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a surreptitious businessman who quickly reveals himself to be a complicated individual. Cassady was a member of the First Earth Battalion, a government funded project during the Cold War attempting to develop an army of “Jedi warriors” who could pacify enemies non-violently, walk through walls, perform remote viewings and combat the Ruskies with the power of thought.

Cassady tells the story of the program founder, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) and how his experiences in Vietnam led him to explore an alternate way to fight a war—through compassion and respect for mankind. Taking advantage of a demoralized and cash-laden Cold War military budget, the First Earth Battalion was formed. Applying New Age philosophy to combat training often lead to dubious results, but Cassady was the star pupil.

Wilton writes his new associate off as a madman, but lacking any other purpose, agrees to follow Cassady into Iraq. The now-retired mind warrior, it seems, has been “re-activated” for a new mission… except that he doesn’t really know what it is yet.

Did I mention this movie is based on true events? Because it is.

The Evidence
Adapted from the nonfiction journalistic exploration of Jon Ronson (a delightful book now surging back in popularity and print via “now a major motion picture” editions) The Men Who Stare at Goats is in many ways an ambitious cinematic project. The work on which it is based—a series of essays and interviews with eccentric cooks and cult leaders—does not lend easily to a cinematic adaptation. When the project was announced, I was skeptical as to how a film version could be executed. The solution is a deforesting of the source material, axing away most of Ronson’s narrative and interviews and replacing it with a original story encircling the same fundamental premise: the United States government funding of research and training into creating “psychic warriors” that could battle the Russians (who rumor had were already researching their own paranormal troops). If 10% of the original source material in the book remains, it would be generous.

Still, what remains is good, good stuff. A healthy combination of ass-kicking in Vietnam combined with excessive military budget spending in the Cold War gave the government license to fund practically any oddball experiment it wanted, provided it had national defense at its core, and the idea that American soldiers could incapacitate enemy forces with the power of their mind didn’t seem too crazy. After all, Star Wars was a hit, so maybe Jedi powers were worth exploring. When the notion of the First Earth Battalion was suggested, it was never implemented—at least not officially—but many of the ideas resonated throughout various levels of the intelligence community. The US tried its hand at remote viewing, teleportation, retrocognition, psychokinesis, and of course, staring at goats, with varying degrees of success. The Men Who Stare at Goats captures all this in glorious, surreal detail by way of its hapless protagonist, Bob Wilton, a reporter (like Ronson) who inadvertently stumbled upon a story nobody else was talking about. He meets Lyn Cassady, an ex-First Earth Battalion Jedi Warrior (who now owns a dance studio) in Kuwait, and the whole story unfolds.

From this point on, the story is in artistic license mode, sending Wilton and Cassady into Iraq on a series of bumbling misadventures interjected with flashbacks covering various key historic events from the novel. The film relies heavily on narration and voiceover work, a negative element to most feature films, but in The Men Who Stare at Goats, there is little choice. The film would make no sense without the backdrop of the absurdities of the stories contained in Ronson’s book, so the narrative is essentially cut into two strips—one following Wilton and Cassady in Iraq, the other following the early proponents of the First Earth Battalion (an increasingly typecast Jeff Bridges) and a young Cassady.

A lot of detail gets left on the editing room floor, but the film moves easily and carefree; a string of zany comedic dialogue, physical comedy and svelte camera framing swings the suffering Wilton between complete disbelief and hope in putting faith in “the mission”. In terms of humor, The Men Who Stare at Goats will be a crowd-pleasing film, full of lighthearted sight gags and excessively zany performances by its cast. Directed by Grant Heslov, actor and longtime Clooney collaborator, the film has style and aplomb, and rests on the performances of its all-star cast do the comedic heavy lifting. Ewan McGregor’s American accent is a bit weak, but he makes a great straight man, and the constant references to him having “Jedi potential” are deliciously ironic. Clooney gives the same performance as in Syriana, if he was a raving LSD-tripping lunatic with psychic powers, and gets more laughs than anyone else. Jeff Bridges plays The Dude from The Big Lebowski in a military uniform, a role in which he seems to find himself in more and more these days, and Kevin Spacey tries (but fails) to be the movie’s chief villain. The problem of course is that there really is no villain, no catharsis, and no real plot to speak of. This is just a sequence of misadventures both hilarious and unbelievable, and the lack of a cohesive plot ultimately hinders the film from greatness.

The two storylines, past and present day eventually correlate in the third act, and The Men Who Stare at Goats derails here. In the eleventh hour, it occurs to the screenplay author that a finale is required full of spectacle and pathos, but it comes out of nowhere and doesn’t really many any sense. This is the consequence to adapting a subject that belies convention. After all, it is hard to write a sensible screenplay about such an inherently nonsensical subject matter. The crux of the film rests on the lamentation that the First Earth Battalion ideas failed to find traction, that the inherent goodness of the project—however drug-addled and hippie-oriented its origins may have been—failed to find resonance. There were good intentions at work, and the ending tries to spin this all back into focus for audiences, illustrating the absurdities of the modern army by way of grizzled and burned-out psychic Jedi warriors running amuck in an army base. The ending is weak, and here is where we see the nonfiction wheat separate from the cinematic chaff, but the journey is sufficiently entertaining that most audience members won’t mind one bit. All the good bits are loaded into the first two acts anyway. The film has heart and passion for its subject, and it’s hard not to be enthused.

Closing Statement
Lighthearted and zany, The Men Who Stare at Goats is an easy victory, provided you don’t expect much from the plot. A star-studded cast of unhinged performances and a subject matter so crazy it has to be true, make this one an easy recommend.

The Verdict
8/10

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